According to a report in Haaretz, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told Gates that Israel should end the occupation of the West Bank by September.

Almost two years ago, Fayyad announced plans to have the institutions of Palestinian statehood ready by September 2011.

In recent months, with the negotiations towards a two-state solution at a stalemate, Palestinian officials in Ramallah have spoken about going to the United Nations to begin preparations to request admission to UN membership of a new state of Palestine.

The Haaretz report, published here, “Fayyad stressed to Gates the importance of meeting the September deadline set in what he called the ‘Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State’ program, a statement issued by the premier’s office said. According to this two year program, by the end of August the Palestinians would have completed building their state institutions and enforced security on the ground, to allow them to establish their independent state. Fayyad told Gates that Israeli restrictions are obstructing Palestinian efforts to build their state institutions. He also said that Israel’s settlement expansion and military incursions into Palestinian Authority-run cities in the West Bank caused problems”.

Israeli officials are saying that a unilateral Palestinian move would be catastrophic, because it would bring a strong Israeli reaction — but, since they are now convinced of the urgent necessity for any solution to be a two-state model, it’s hard to understand their aversion to the Palestinian leadership’s planned moves — except as a compulsive need to maintain control.

The Jerusalem Post published an article today, here, stating that “Israel failed to realize until recently that the Palestinian bid to win United Nations General Assembly endorsement for statehood in September might not be merely declarative, but could have profound practical consequences under the provisions of a little-known UNGA resolution, Gabriela Shalev, the former Israeli ambassador to the UN, has told The Jerusalem Post. UNGA Resolution 377, also known as the “Uniting for Peace” resolution, was passed during the Korean War in 1950, at the initiative of the US, because the Soviet Union was vetoing UN Security Council action to protect South Korea. It permits the General Assembly to recommend a range of ‘collective measures’ to supportive states, including sanctions and even the use of force, in cases where the permanent members of the Security Council cannot reach unanimity and where ‘there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression’. The existence of UNGA Resolution 377, and the precedents for its use, said Shalev, mean that ‘those who believe that the UN General Assembly’s deliberations are of a solely declarative importance are mistaken’. If the Palestinians can gain General Assembly recognition for statehood under a ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution, she warned, ‘it would be a real obstacle… not just a public relations setback. This would seek to impose on us some kind of Palestinian state’. Shalev said that Israel only ‘just found out about this’ – thanks, she said, to research done by Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi’s The Israel Project. Palestinian officials have said repeatedly that they intend to seek UN recognition for ‘Palestine’ by September. It is widely assumed that a resolution to that effect would not receive the binding approval of the 15- member Security Council – where it might not gain the nine ‘yes’ votes it would need, and where, even if it did, the US would likely use its veto. In the General Assembly, by contrast, a resolution recommending a state of Palestine would easily receive two-thirds support, diplomatic sources say. But the assumption in Israel until recently was that while such a vote might further dent Israel’s international standing, it would have no practical consequences. By invoking the non-binding ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution, however, the GA could then recommend that ‘collective measures’ be taken by individual states in support of the statehood resolution. Richard Schifter, a former US assistant secretary of state, noted a 1981 precedent in which the General Assembly utilized Resolution 377 to advance the struggle for Namibian independence. That resolution called upon member states ‘to render increased and sustained support and material, financial, military and other assistance to the South West Africa People’s Organization to enable it to intensify its struggle for the liberation of Namibia’. And it urged member states to immediately cease ‘all dealings with South Africa in order totally to isolate it politically, economically, militarily and culturally’.” This can be read in full here.

Earlier on Friday, before Gates went to Ramallah, he met Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu in Caesariya, where the Netanyahu family home is, Netanyahu told journalists that “We stand ready to act with great force and great determination to put a stop” to firing of rockets, mortars and missiles from Gaza that land on the adjacent Israeli periphery.

Justice el-Araby’s opinion, part of the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on The Wall,  can be read in full here.

Now, apparently, the report — containing “recommendations for U.S. Middle East peacemaking” — has been released. Entitled “A Last Chance for a Two-State Israel-Palestine Agreement”, it can be read in full here].

It suggests the following:
“1. Present a Clear U.S. Vision to End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict … The U.S. parameters should reflect the following fundamental compromises:
• Two states, based on the lines of June 4, 1967, with minor, reciprocal, and agreed-upon modifications as expressed in a 1:1 land swap, to take into account areas heavily populated by Israelis in the West Bank;
• A solution to the refugee problem consistent with the two-state solution, that does not entail a general right of return, addresses the Palestinian refugees’ sense of injustice, and provides them with meaningful financial compensation as well as resettlement assistance;
• Jerusalem as home to both capitals, with Jewish neighborhoods falling under Israeli sovereignty and Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian sovereignty, with special arrangements for the Old City providing each side control of its respective holy places and unimpeded access by each community to them;
• A non-militarized Palestinian state, together with security mechanisms that address Israeli concerns while respecting Palestinian sovereignty, and a U.S.-led multinational force to ensure a peaceful transitional security period. This coalition peacekeeping structure, under UN mandate, would feature American leadership of a NATO force supplemented by Jordanians, Egyptians and Israelis. We can envision a five-year, renewable mandate with the objective of achieving full Palestinian domination of security affairs on the Palestine side of the line within 15 years.
2. Encourage Israeli-Syrian Negotiations
3. A More Pragmatic Approach Toward Hamas and a Palestinian Unity Government”.

Kathleen and Bill Christison took the report apart, in an article published in Counterpunch on 15 April, in which they wrote: “The end of George W. Bush’s long tenure and the advent of Barack Obama have now given rise to other initiatives that are as naïve and myopic as the aid pledges [to reconstruct Gaza]– myopic because, wittingly or not, they come from a starting point that is totally centered on Israel and its demands and totally oblivious to Israel’s barbaric behavior”…

The Christison’s critique continued: “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton speak earnestly of the ‘inevitability’ and the ‘inescapability’ of a solution based on two states, without regard to the growing impossibility of a real Palestinian state or to the fact that Israel is killing off any prospect for such a state and is in fact openly killing off the Palestinians. The early months of the administration, and the appointment of George Mitchell as special Middle East envoy, are bringing out others who, more enamored of the process than of any prospect of genuine peace, blindly pursue the ‘peace-process industry’ regardless of realities on the ground or the virtual guarantee of failure. Probably the most detailed plan purporting to lay out a path toward a two-state solution was actually written before Obama took office and is only now being publicized. This plan — entitled “A Last Chance for a Two-State Israel-Palestine Agreement” — was drawn up in December by a group of well meaning U.S. elder statesmen, including Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lee Hamilton, and Paul Volcker, the only one of the ten to enter the Obama administration. The elders were drawn together by Henry Seigman, a former head of the American Jewish Committee and scholar of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict who has distinguished himself in recent years by his frank, realistic criticism of the Israeli occupation. The proposal is a 17-page blueprint for achieving the impossible. It approaches the conflict from an Israel-centered perspective and indeed, by heavily emphasizing the need to meet Israel’s security needs, contains the prescription for its own failure. The report devotes a remarkable one-fifth of its entire length to an annex on “Addressing Israel’s Security Challenges”, in addition to considerable verbiage devoted to this subject in the body of the document. There is no mention whatsoever of any need to ensure Palestine’s security against threats from Israel”.

The Christisons write that “The impulse behind this plan is admirable: it recognizes the centrality of the Palestinian- Israeli conflict to other issues and U.S. interests in the Middle East; it urges that the new administration overturn the Bush administration’s eight years of disengagement from the conflict and do so quickly; it calls for engaging Hamas; and it urges that the peace effort be undertaken even at the cost of angering ‘certain domestic constituencies’. But the plan itself is naïve and oblivious to the brutal realities of the situation, which existed even before the Gaza assault. Because it takes no account of Israel’s lethal intentions toward the Palestinians or its responsibility for the current level of violence, the report actually encourages Israeli intransigence while blithely assuming that this rigidity can be overcome by issuing a plan on a few pieces of paper while the U.S. continues to send Israel the arms necessary to destroy Palestine. The report exists in a never-never land in which Israel has no responsibility for occupying Palestinian land and has concerns only for its own security but no obligations to the Palestinians. The report refers repeatedly to the ‘chicken and egg’ security situation in the occupied territories — as if it cannot be determined whether Israel’s occupation or Palestinian resistance to it came first, as if the occupation is not the reason for Palestinian resistance, as if the Palestinian suicide bombings that the report says cause Israel ‘understandable anxiety’ might have arisen out of nowhere rather than precisely out of Israel’s oppression. The plan addresses the requirements of peace between the two envisioned states almost solely in terms of Israel’s needs — not only its security needs, but its settlements needs and its concerns about Palestinian refugees’ right of return. For instance, while it calls for the border between the two states to be ‘based on’ the lines of June 1967 with only minor reciprocal modifications, it recommends that the United States ‘take into account areas heavily populated by Israelis in the West Bank’. Although the language minimizes the magnitude of this issue, this passage means that accommodation must be made for major Israeli settlement blocs, which include approximately ten percent of the small Delaware-sized West Bank, cover virtually the entirety of East Jerusalem, and include fully 85 percent of the 475,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In April 2004, George Bush gave Ariel Sharon a letter that officially granted U.S. approval to Israel’s retention of what Bush called ‘major [Jewish] population centers’ in the West Bank, thus altering what had been almost 40 years of U.S. policy supporting a virtually full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. Bill Clinton’s ‘parameters’ outlined in 2000 had done the same on a somewhat smaller scale by proposing to allow Israel to retain its settlements — referred to by the anodyne term ‘neighborhoods’ — in East Jerusalem. The latest proposal by the elder statesmen repeats this Clinton dictum and in general endorses both Clinton’s and Bush’s declarations unilaterally ceding Palestinian land to Israel, without negotiation or consultation with Palestinians”.

Moreover, the Christisons argue, “This proposal also gives away the Palestinians’ right of return. Although it gives a nod to the refugees’ ‘sense of injustice’ and calls for ‘meaningful financial compensation’, it declares, again unilaterally and pre-emptively, that resolution of the refugee problem should ‘protect Israel from an influx of refugees’ — meaning that the right would not be available to all or even most refugees who might choose to return to the homes and land inside Israel from which they were expelled. This provision would ‘protect’ Israel from any requirement that it rectify the massive injustice it perpetrated in 1948 and would require that the victims be satisfied, after 60-plus years, with a little money and a home somewhere outside their own homeland”.

A main point, according to the Christisons, is that “The major element of the elders’ report proposes that the Palestinian state would be non- militarized and would be policed by a U.S.-led, UN-mandated multinational force that would function for five years but would have a renewable mandate, the intention being to permit Palestinians to control their own security affairs (and of course be able to guarantee Israel’s security) within 15 years. The force would be a NATO force supplemented by Jordanian, Egyptian and — amazingly enough — Israeli troops. The Alice-in-Wonderland aspect of this particular proposal is the elders’ assumption that Palestinian sovereignty would somehow be respected even as the Palestinians were being forced to turn their security over to a multinational force that included not merely elements of multiple outside armies, but troops from the very oppressor the Palestinians are presumed to have just shed by attaining statehood”.

And, they write, “This is the kind of ‘peace-process industry’ nonsense that renders proposals such as this utterly meaningless. The proposal gives away, before negotiations have begun, more than any state-to-be could ever possibly afford to give. It cedes territory in what would be the Palestinian state before Palestinians are even able to sit down at the negotiating table. It cedes, without cavil or apology, the Palestinians’ right to redress of a gross injustice that is, and has been from the beginning 60-plus years ago, the fundamental Palestinian grievance against Israel. It cedes Palestinian sovereignty and security by inviting in an international security force including troops of precisely the occupying force that the Palestinians seek to be rid off. And it cedes any viability in the new so-called state. The elders who composed this document should know better. Some of them have actually worked as specialists on the Arab-Israeli conflict in the past, and the proposal’s convener Henry Siegman has been working on this issue for decades. But the proposal exhibits so little understanding of the extent to which Israel has already absorbed the West Bank into itself that it would appear that none of these individuals has ever even visited the region” …

This critique of the recommendations recently made to Obama was published on Counterpunch here.

“The Obama transition team also helped persuade Israel to end the bombing of Gaza and to withdraw its ground troops before the Inauguration. According to the former senior intelligence official, who has access to sensitive information, ‘Cheney began getting messages from the Israelis about pressure from Obama’ when he was President-elect. Cheney, who worked closely with the Israeli leadership in the lead-up to the Gaza war, portrayed Obama to the Israelis as a ‘pro-Palestinian’, who would not support their efforts (and, in private, disparaged Obama, referring to him at one point as someone who would ‘never make it in the major leagues’). But the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other high-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel. “It was Jones”—retired Marine General James Jones, at the time designated to be the President’s national-security adviser—’who came up with the solution and told Obama, “You just can’t tell the Israelis to get out”.’ (General Jones said that he could not verify this account; Cheney’s office declined to comment.)
…
“One issue that may be a casualty of an Obama rapprochement with Syria is human rights. Syrians are still being jailed for speaking out against the policies of their government. Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East director for Human Rights Watch, said that Assad ‘has been offering fig leafs to the Americans for a long time and thinks if he makes nice in Lebanon and with Hamas and Hezbollah he will no longer be an outcast. We believe that no amount of diplomatic success will solve his internal problems’. The authorities, Whitson said, are ‘going after ordinary Syrians—like people chatting in cafés. Everyone is looking over their shoulder’.”
…
“Assad, in his interview with me, acknowledged, ‘We do not say that we are a democratic country. We do not say that we are perfect, but we are moving forward’. And he focussed on what he had to offer. He said that he had a message for Obama: Syria, as a secular state, and the United States faced a common enemy in Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism. The Bush White House, he said, had viewed the fundamentalists as groups ‘that you should go and chase, and then you will accomplish your mission, as Bush says. It is not that simple. How do you deal with a state of mind? You can deal with it in many different ways—except for the army’. Speaking of Obama, he said in his e-mail, ‘We are happy that he has said that diplomacy—and not war—is the means of conducting international policy’.

“Assad’s goal in seeking to engage with America and Israel is clearly more far-reaching than merely to regain the Golan Heights. His ultimate aim appears to be to persuade Obama to abandon the Bush Administration’s strategy of aligning America with the so-called ‘moderate’ Arab Sunni states—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan—in a coördinated front against Shiite Iran, Shiite Hezbollah, and Hamas.

“ ‘Of course, the Iranians are nervous about the talks, because they don’t fully trust the Syrians’, Itamar Rabinovich said. ‘But the Assad family does not believe in taking chances—they’re very hard bargainers. They will try to get what they want without breaking fully from Iran, and they will tell us and Washington, “It’s to your advantage not to isolate Iran”.’ Rabinovich added, ‘Both Israel and the United States will insist on a change in Syria’s relationship with Iran. This can only be worked out—or not—in head-to-head talks’.

“The White House has tough diplomatic choices to make in the next few months. Assad has told the Obama Administration that his nation can ease the American withdrawal in Iraq. Syria also can help the U.S. engage with Iran, and the Iranians, in turn, could become an ally in neighboring Afghanistan, as the Obama Administration struggles to deal with the Taliban threat and its deepening involvement in that country—and to maintain its long-standing commitment to the well-being of Israel. Each of these scenarios has potential downsides. Resolving all of them will be formidable, and will involve sophisticated and intelligent diplomacy—the kind of diplomacy that disappeared during the past eight years, and that the Obama team has to prove it possesses”.
This Seymour Hersh article can be read in full in The New Yorker here.

But what really caused an uproar was his statement that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice believed that the post-Annapolis direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority was — and should be — conducted on the basis of 1967 borders.

This confirms what Israeli sources who follow their government’s settlement activities closely have said in interviews this past week — that there is strong American pressure on Israel concerning certain areas in and around Jerusalem, and to have a solution fast…

UPDATE: The Jerusalem Post has reported that “Israel conveyed its displeasure to Washington on Thursday over remarks reportedly made by US Consul General Jacob Walles that it had agreed to start negotiations with the Palestinians over Jerusalem. The comments prompted a bitter row among Kadima’s would-be leaders. According to government sources, Walles’s comments, which appeared in the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam, were ‘highly inappropriate’, since there is a US-Palestinian-Israeli agreement not to go public with what is being discussed by the negotiators … Walles said changes to those lines were possible should both sides agree”.

The JPost report added that “Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a Kadima Party meeting at Kfar Hamaccabiah in Ramat Gan on Thursday night that his government was sticking by its position that Jerusalem should be left until the end of the talks. ‘We have achieved significant progress, but we haven’t started the negotiations on Jerusalem yet’, Olmert told a crowd of several hundred party activists and supporters. ‘We said this issue would be handled last, and that is what we’ll do’ … Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, in an interview on Channel 1, said in reference to the Walles comments that ‘what was said was not correct’. [But] She refused to answer when asked whether she thought Israel should control the Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem. After the problematic nature of Walles comments became clear – they contradict what Olmert has been saying for months, and also put Livni, the head of Israel’s negotiating team, in an uncomfortable position facing next week’s Kadima primary – State Department spokesman Sean McCormack issued a clarification. ‘The US government has not taken a position on borders’, the McCormack statement read. ‘While the discussions between the parties are confidential, we can state that the parties have not in any way prejudiced long-held views on borders. A senior US official who participated in the discussions denies that the Israeli side, led by chief negotiator Foreign Minister Livni, has been willing to negotiate concerning Jerusalem. The secretary participated in the negotiations in a way that respected the Israeli position’. During his interview, Walles said that although the goal of the Bush administration was to have a working agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis by the time US President George W. Bush leaves office in January, should that deadline fail to be achieved, all progress made up until that point would pass over to the next administration … Walles also said that Israel had made little progress in removing settlement outposts, and had increased settlement construction since the Annapolis conference last November”

This JPost article can be read in full here .

“I’m looking forward to what will unfortunately be a brief visit to the – to Israel and to Ramallah to discuss how we continue to push forward in the negotiations, to talk with people about the situation on the ground. General Fraser is with me and he’s going to stay behind to continue to work on some of the issues on the ground. I think at some point perhaps it’ll be a good thing for him to talk a little bit with you about some of the things that have been going on there.

“But obviously, we keep trying to push all of the tracks of Annapolis forward. And the trilaterals that I’ve had have been useful in helping the two sides to find areas of convergence, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do. Undoubtedly, it will not be my last trip here.

…

“…the way that we’ve been conducting these trilaterals is to help the parties in what has, for the most part to date, been a process that – in which they have not wanted to have public discussion of what they’re doing. They’ve wanted to push forward on these – on sensitive issues and continue to do that. They have an agreement that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. They also have an agreement that they’re not going to go out and talk about what they’re doing in each of the meetings. And so I honor that when we go to the trilaterals, because I think it’s extremely important just to keep making forward progress rather than trying prematurely to come to some set of conclusions.

“We continue to have the same goal, which is to reach agreement by the end of the year; a lot of work ahead to do that, and obviously, it’s a complicated time. But, you know, it’s always complicated out here. And we’ll just continue to do what I’ve done in these trilaterals over the last, I don’t know, four or five that I’ve had
…

“QUESTION: Madame Secretary, Foreign Minister Livni spoke to the press last week and she warned against too much international pressure, too much pressure to try to bridge the gaps. And obviously there’s an election coming up in the Kadima party, so are you mindful of that as you head into this trip?

“SECRETARY RICE: The internal politics of Israel are the internal politics of Israel. But I don’t think that anyone has been trying to bring pressure to bridge the gaps. What we’ve been trying to do is to help the parties to see how their own conversations might converge. And we’re going to continue to do that. And I think if you look back, you will have seen – you will have seen comments like that several times before.
…

“QUESTION: What is your assessment now of where Israel is in terms of respecting its Roadmap commitments and in terms of the quality of the roadblocks that it has removed?

“SECRETARY RICE: Well, I think that – let me start by saying both sides continue to have work to do on the Roadmap. And General Fraser and I have been talking on this trip about the importance of both sides accelerating their progress. I will say that there have been a couple of major – well, let me call – use the word “significant” checkpoints that have been lifted. That’s a good sign. Obviously, there is more that needs to be done. But that’s a good sign. And I think the Jenin project continues to mature. That’s also a good sign. But on both sides, in terms of Palestinian security and judicial reform, and in terms of movement and access, the Israelis and the Palestinians have work to do.
….

“…we said early on that if there – that calm in Gaza would be a useful thing because it – the Egyptians, who – with whom we worked, have managed to keep what is a very fragile situation at least stable, and that’s certainly a help to any process of trying to move forward on the peace process.

“Ultimately, though, Gaza has to be resolved and it has to be resolved on the basis of the – Abu Mazen’s program for it, which is that legitimate Palestinian Authority institutions have to be reinstated. I think we want to continue to look at what can be done at the crossings for regularization of those ultimately along the lines of the November 2005 agreement. So this is not, I think, a metastable situation, but it’s a situation that for now has seemed to allow at least people to – you know, the levels of violence to stay low, and that’s welcome.

“QUESTION: Do you see Hamas wanting a political role? Do you see Hamas wanting a political role and that’s why it’s calm?

“SECRETARY RICE: I think there are multiple incentives and motivations for the calm that is there. But Abu Mazen himself has laid out how a political “reconciliation” could take place. But obviously, a return to the status quo ante and a number of other steps will have to be taken, including continuing – including accepting the agreements that Palestinians have signed decades ago.
…
“There’s no doubt that the prisoner exchange is extremely important to – very important to the Palestinians. It’s something that Abu Mazen brings up each time we meet. And I don’t know whether or not it’s taken place, but if, in fact, it does, it would be a very good step. This is something that matters a lot to the Palestinians. It matters a lot to the Palestinian people. And it obviously is a sign of goodwill, particularly because it’s my understanding that some of these are pre-Oslo prisoners, which has been particularly of concern”…

Pappe, who has written in favor of a one-state solution, left Haifa last year and is now teaching at Exeter University in the U.K.

His analysis continues: “So the model of the most dangerous ward developed: the leading strategists in the army and the government embrace themselves for a very long-term ‘management’ of the system they have built, while pledging commitment to a vacuous ‘peace process,’ with very little global interest in it, and a continued struggle from within, against it. The Gaza Strip is now seen as the most dangerous ward in this complex and thus the one against which the most brutal punitive means have to be employed. Killing the ‘inmates’ by aerial or artillery bombing, or by economic strangulation, are not just inevitable results of the punitive action chosen, but also desirable ones …  Downsizing the number of ‘inmates’ in both mega prisons [the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip] would be still a very high priority in this strategy by means of ethnic cleansing, systematic killings and economic strangulation. But there are wedges that prevent the destructive machine from rolling. It seems that a growing number of Jews in Israel (a majority according to a recent CNN poll) wish their government to begin negotiations with Hamas. A mega prison is fine, but if the wardens’ residential areas are likely to come under fire in the future then the system fails. Alas, I doubt whether the CNN poll represents accurately the present Israeli mood; but it does indicate a hopeful trend that vindicates the Hamas insistence that Israel only understands the language of force. But it may not be enough and the perfection of the mega prison system in the meantime continues unabated and the punitive measures of its authority are claiming the lives of many more children, women and men in the Gaza Strip. As always it is important to be reminded that the west can put an end to this unprecedented inhumanity and criminality, tomorrow. But so far this is not happening”.  Ilan Pappe’s piece can be read in full here.